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Margaret
Bourke-white: The Early Work, 1922-1930 (Pocket Paragon Series)
by Ronald E. Ostman, Harry Littell, Margaret Bourke-White
Paperback from David R Godine
ISBN: 1567922996
Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was one of the leading photojournalists
of her time, a mainstay of the Luce empire whose signature work for Fortune
celebrated the machine age and whose later work for Life featured
the human face and a "progressive" humanitarian sensibility. Many of her
photo essays are classics; indeed those on the Louisville Flood and its
victims, on the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and on the poverty
of India and Pakistan are now part of the iconography of the twentieth
century.
In this brief collection of her earliest work, two art historians present
the "unknown" Bourke-White, the young amateur aged eighteen to twenty-six.
Her first photographs, created in 1921 under the tutelage of Columbia University's
Clarence H. White, were impeccably designed soft-edged still lifes, "painterly"
images characteristic of the period but not of the artist. Bourke-White
took this technique to college Â- to the University of Michigan and
to Cornell Â- and there made traditional portraits of campus buildings
and, almost by accident, her first "industrial" photograph, a Duchamp-like
study of loudspeakers. After graduation she moved to Cleveland, where,
trembling with fear and aesthetic excitement, she photographed the interior
of the Otis Steel Mill, the trestles of the High Level Bridge, and the
new Terminal Tower. It was these thrilling Cleveland photographs, made
in 1928Â-30, that won her an audience with Luce, who sent her on
to Fortune . . . and to fame.
The eighty photographs reproduced here have seldom been seen outside
the archives of Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and the University
of Syracuse Library. They will fascinate anyone interested in the life
and work of Margaret Bourke-White and the early history of American photojournalism. |
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Margaret
Bourke White
by Susan Goldman Rubin
Hardcover from Harry N. Abrams
An inspiring biography of one of the most successful photojournalists
of the 20th century, this life of Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) is
exactly the type of book teachers and parents of adolescent girls are looking
for. It would be a mistake to treat this as a book for girls only, however,
when so many great men--Bourke-White's father, her second husband, several
darkroom technicians, and even General Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the
12th Air Force in World War II--figure prominently in it as mentors, teachers,
colleagues, and friends. Author Susan Goldman Rubin gracefully deals with
sensitive material such as the photographer's shame at discovering that
her father was Jewish. And she does a remarkable job of choosing appropriate
pictures. As the chief photographer for Life magazine, Bourke-White
shot many hugely important but often harsh subjects. Rubin deftly edits
these images so that famous photos like the haunting Living Dead of
Buchenwald, April, 1945 are here, but not such profoundly disturbing
ones as Bourke-White's shot of bony corpses stacked for burning. The author
underscores the photographer's extraordinary self-confidence as a young
woman of huge ambitions and--beginning with Bourke-White's initial flirtation
with the soft-focus style of Edward Steichen--delineates the growing power
and clarity of her mature documentary style. Bourke-White's life-long interest
in science--she kept jars of multilegged fauna on her office bookshelves
at Life--is fascinating, and the stories of her wartime adventures--in
marooned life rafts, low-flying reconnaissance planes, and torpedoed ships--are
frighteningly vivid.
The photographs themselves are ultimately given pride of place, in large
duotone reproductions that do them ample justice. This book would be right
for anyone over 10, and older readers might go on to Sean Callahan's Margaret
Bourke-White: Photographer, which is more of a traditional monograph
and includes those images that tell truths so painful that Bourke-White
herself had great difficulty sorting their negatives. --Peggy Moorman |
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You
Have Seen Their Faces
by Erskine Caldwell
Paperback from University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082031692X
In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell
and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling
across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to
document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration
resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's
desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic
comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee
and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded
by more than three years.
Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary,
they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered
animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the
right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the
depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped. |
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Margaret
Bourke-White: Photography of Design, 1927-1936
by Stephen Bennett Phillips
Hardcover from Rizzoli
Media Published: 2003-
ISBN: 0847825051
Before Margaret Bourke-White became America's first well-known photojournalist,
she was photographing the beginnings of Americas machine age, focusing
on factories, machinery and the objects this technology produced. These
striking images, which transformed prosaic objects into modernist masterpieces-were
the foundation for work she later did for Fortune, Life, and other important
national magazines. Organized by the Phillips Collection, an exhibition
and this accompanying catalogue feature many photographs which have never
before been published, and presents new research on the images. An extensive
chronology of her career is also provided.
How did Margaret Bourke-White become the top photographer for Fortune
and Life, a globetrotting adventuress who held court in the most
glamorous studio on earth--a Chrysler Building penthouse patrolled by alligators,
adjacent to the fierce gargoyle she made famous? By first muscling in as
a master of the masculine art of corporate photography. For the first time,
that early work has gotten its due in Stephen Bennett Phillips' Margaret
Bourke-White: The Photography of Design 1927-36. In insightful prose
and glossily reproduced black-and-white photos, he opens our eyes to her
fast-developing genius. Her 1927 photos of Cleveland's Terminal Tower expertly
aped the fuzzy, romantic pictorialism of early Edward Steichen, but her
1928 shot of the same building through the spiral grillwork shows her rigorous
sense of composition. After she discovered magnesium lighting, her pictures
of what could've been ordinary industrial scenes acquired stunning star
power. Rows of tin soup cans, aluminum rods, hogs hanging in a stockyard,
Moscow ballet dancers, Wurlitzer organ pipes: she transformed them all
into patterns bespeaking brute power. Her camera was a magic device that
transformed everything she saw into a shiny Deco masterpiece. This book
is as smart and beautiful as its stellar subject. --Tim Appelo |
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